Methods Lab @ Weizenbaum Institute

The Methods Lab is the central unit for supporting, connecting, and coordinating the methods training and consulting at the Weizenbaum Institute. Besides assisting ongoing research projects of the research groups and units, the lab also conducts methods research and develops tools for the collection and analysis of digital data.


Latest Blog Posts

  • New preprint article: Extracting smartphone use from Android event log data
    With smartphones now more prevalent in everyday life than ever before, understanding their use and its implications becomes increasingly necessary. While self-reporting in surveys is the method typically used to assess smartphone use, it is affected by various problems such as distorted retrospection, social desirability bias, and high aggregation. More […]
  • Workshop Recap: Open Research – Principles, Practices, and Implementation
    On September 3 2024, Tobias Dienlin from the University of Vienna held the workshop Open Research – Principles, Practices, and Implementation at WI. In this workshop, he gave an overview of Open Research and its motivations, relevance, and formal and technical implementation. In the first part of the workshop, Tobias […]
  • Workshop: Open Research – Principles, Practices, and Implementation (September 3, 2024)
    We’re excited to announce our upcoming workshop Open Research – Principles, Practices, and Implementation, which will take place on Tuesday, September 3. This workshop will be conducted both at the Weizenbaum Institute and online, and is open to Weizenbaum Institute members as well as external participants (and the QPD). Led […]
  • Short Project: Ethics of Data Work
    AI systems rely heavily on workers who face precarious conditions. Data work, clickwork, and crowdwork—essential for validating algorithms and creating datasets to train and refine AI systems—are frequently outsourced by commercial entities and academic institutions. Despite the vast and growing workforce of 435 million data workers enabling machine learning, their […]